New Books In Biography

If Lord Derby was the ‘forgotten Prime Minister’ and Andrew Bonar-Law was the ‘Unknown Prime Minister’ then Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770-1828), 2nd Earl of Liverpool, who was Britain’s longest serving prime minister since William Pitt the Younger, surely deserves is own epithet. While not providing us with that, William Anthony Hay, Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University has instead provided us with the definitive modern study of Lord Liverpool’s political career–Lord Liverpool: A Political Life (Boydell Press, 2018. In a beautifully written and produced book, one that any student of late 18th century and early 19th century British history will not wish to be without, Hay delineates for the reader Lord Liverpool’s manifold achievements and failures in office. From such seismic events as the War of 1812 with the United States, the endgame of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna, the Corn Laws, the Peterloo Massacre, to the escalating contention over the issue of Catholic Emanc

We have all seen pictures of the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) at their historic meeting Yalta in February 1945. The three leaders command the viewer’s attention, naturally, but in the background of the various versions of that photo are other important figures. One can glimpse George Marshall in some. Foreign ministers Eden and Molotov appear in others. American Admirals King and Leahy are there. And so is a U.S. Army Air Force general named Larry Kuter. Not exactly a household name, Kuter was an enormously influential figure, who richly deserves this excellent biography written by airpower expert, Brian Laslie: Architect of Air Power: General Laurence S. Kuter and the Birth of the U.S. Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2017). Dr. Laslie is the Deputy Command Historian at NORAD and US Northern Command and the author of another noteworthy book on the U.S. Air Force: The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after Vietnam (2015), which I can also recommend. Laslie kept encounteri

Jonathan W. White, an associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, is the author of Lincoln on Law, Leadership, and Life (Cumberland House, 2015). In this work White reveals the moral character of Abraham Lincoln through his law practice.  Lincoln was a lawyer on the American frontier in Illinois, representing clients ranging from individuals in divorces and railroads in contract disputes.  Throughout his career he rendered advice, not only to clients but to prospective young lawyers and friends.  Lincoln’s experience as a lawyer is both revealing about the norms of law practice in the antebellum period and about the formation of Lincoln’s approach to law and governance, which would influence his behavior as President during the Civil War.  White has an eye for entertaining and revealing anecdotes.  In revealing how Lincoln practiced law White helps uncover Lincoln as a person, beyond the reverential historical figure we all know from America’s Civil War. Ian J. Drake is an As

In about 1978, I found myself in my high school library. I don’t know why I was there except to say I was probably on detention; I didn’t do a lot of reading in those days. In any event, I was wandering around the stacks and I found a book called My Lai 4. I knew a little about the My Lai massacre because I knew a little about the Vietnam War; my father had been in the army in the 1960s and my uncle had fought in Vietnam. I started reading. It’s not often that a book stays with you your whole life, but Seymour M. Hersh‘s My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (Random House, 1970) did. Hersh reported–that’s just the word–what happened: he did not embellish, he did not moralize, he did not speculate. He tirelessly interviewed the men who were there, the men who commanded them, and read everything he could get his hands on. Then he told a shocked American public: this happened. His reporting arguably changed the course of the Vietnam War. It changed the course of my life, as I went on to write a b

Originally published in 1994, Marc Leeds’ The Vonnegut Encyclopedia (Delacorte Press, 2016) was initially conceived of as a comprehensive A-Z guide to the expansive oeuvre of the American author Kurt Vonnegut. The encyclopedia was created as resource for scholars, teachers and casual fans of Vonnegut’s work and was comprised of detailed entries on all of his plays, novels and stories, in addition to descriptions of individual characters, narratives and motifs. Readers of Vonnegut will, of course, be aware that rather than distinct, hermetically sealed texts, each of Vonnegut’s works forms part of a larger fictional universe wherein characters, locations, turns of phrase and even consumer products cross back and forth between different novels, short stories and plays. As such, Leeds’ encyclopedia allows researchers and readers to cross reference recurring characters, words and plot points. The book also serves as something of a glossary of Vonnegut’s various neologisms (e.g. “foma” and “karass”) as well as pro

The achievements of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great are often presented as primarily the work of a singular genius. As Richard A. Billows demonstrates in his book Before and After Alexander: The Legend and Legacy of Alexander the Great (The Overlook Press, 2018), such an interpretation ignores the considerable advantages that he inherited. Foremost among them was Macedonia itself, which was a kingdom rich in resources, especially when compared to the more economically marginal Greek city-states to the south. Recognizing the advantages that Macedonia possessed and utilizing them to defeat Balkan invaders, Alexander’s father Philip II began the process of turning Macedonia’s potential into reality. By reorganizing the Macedonian military and employing it effectively in a series of wars, Philip forged it into a fearsome fighting force that Alexander inherited upon his father’s assassination in 336 BCE. It was by employing the generals of Philip’s armies and the tactics they developed that Alexander

Brian Abrams interviewed more than 100 people – Democrats, Republicans, cabinet officials, White House aides, campaign operatives, congresspeople and activists – to piece together a comprehensive oral history of the Barack Obama presidency, in Obama: An Oral History, 2009-2017 (Little A, 2018).  Based almost solely on the words of those who helped Obama win election and govern the country, Abrams begins with Obama’s famous anti-war speech in 2002 and carries the reader through the shocking aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory. Through often candid and unvarnished remembrances, readers will relive the debates between Democrats and Republicans, and between pragmatists and idealists, that shaped Obama’s legacy and continue to reverberate. Abrams gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most dramatic presidencies in history. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The

In Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (Yale University Press, 2018), Brigham Young University Associate Professor Jenny Hale Pulispher demonstrates that Indians, too, could play the land game for both personal and political benefit.  According to his kin, John Wompas was “no sachem,” although he claimed that status to achieve his economic and political ends. He drew on the legal and political practices of both Indians and the English—even visiting and securing the support of King Charles II—to legitimize the land sales that funded his extravagant spending. But he also used the knowledge acquired in his English education to defend the land and rights of his fellow Nipmucs. His biography offers a window on seventeenth-century New England and the Atlantic world from the unusual perspective of an American Indian who, even though he may not have been what he claimed, was certainly out of the ordinary. Drawing on documentary and anthr

There comes a time in every man’s life when he’s got to grow up. Personally, I found growing up very hard. I went to college and fell in love with it. And what’s not to love? You meet really interesting people (some very attractive, if you get my drift); you get to yak about really fascinating though useless stuff into the wee hours (and sleep late!); you can play pick-up basketball at nearly any hour of the day (“I got next”); there’s a lot of beer to be drunk and, um, other things to be ingested (some of which will, so you are told, “expand your mind” or something like that); and you don’t really have to work (other than the job you get to raise the money to buy the aforementioned beer). Oh, and the dining hall (a really magical place) always had soft serve! It never occurred to me  to leave this youthful paradise of irresponsibility. So I didn’t; I went to graduate school where I continued to live that indolent life for nearly another decade. And even when I was done there and got my first “job”, I contin

For the most part women in the classical world have suffered from what Duane W. Roller terms “near-invisibility,” obscuring the consequential roles that at times they played in government and politics. In his book Cleopatra’s Daughter: And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era (Oxford University Press, 2018), Roller recounts the lives of more than a half-dozen women in the last decades of the 1st century BC and early decades of the 1st century AD to show how they exercised power during the early years of the Roman Empire. Drawing upon a tradition of royal women in the ancient Near East, these women – Cleopatra Selene, Glaphyra of Cappadocia, Salome of Judaea, Dynamis of Bosporous, Pythodoris of Pontos, Aba of Olbe, and Mousa of Parthia – all played crucial roles as rulers in kingdoms on the periphery of the Augustan empire. As Roller explains, their success in maintaining their positions both depended in part upon the support of powerful women in the Augustan family and, in turn, served as role models for roy

As every scholar of African Americans knows, Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is an essential resource for black history. But who was Schomburg? In Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (SUNY Press, 2018), Vanessa Valdés recovers the important legacy of the man whose name, collection, and activism are now attached forever to the legacies of the African Diaspora. Dr. Valdés situates Schomburg’s life within the context of his multi-layered identity as an Afro-Puerto Rican man born and formatively shaped in the Spanish Caribbean during a fraught period. This period witnessed Puerto Rico’s abolition of slavery and the imperialist Spanish-Cuban-American War as well. These events shaped the young man who migrated to the United States in the early 1890s and who became one of the leading Black bibliophiles and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanit

Today, the Neo-Gothic Manchester Town Hall stands as one of the notable architectural features of England’s second city. It also serves, however, as a towering monument to the career of Abel Heywood, a businessman and politician who, as Joanna M. Williams details in her book Manchester’s Radical Mayor: Abel Heywood, The Man Who Built the Town Hall (The History Press, 2017), did much to guide his city through its transition from a town still governed by medieval institutions into a modern industrialized metropolis. Though born into poverty, Heywood built up a thriving printing and bookselling business at an early age. A radical in his politics, Heywood nevertheless won a succession of positions in local government, serving as both a town councilor and as an alderman prior to his first election as mayor in 1862. It was during his second term in 1877 that he presided over the opening of his city’s new town hall, which served as both as a symbol of Manchester’s newfound status and an embodiment of Heywood’s role

In Werner Scholem: A German Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Mirjam Zadoff, Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, presents a biography of an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era. This biography suggests that the ‘non-Jewish’ Communist Jew was not as irreconcilably opposed to the ‘Jewish’ Jew as has previously been thought. It is an extraordinary work that will be referenced for many years to come. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

John Mackay’s life began humbly, immigrating as a child from an impoverished Irish household to New York City where he worked selling newspapers in the streets. Within four decades, he was a stakeholder in one of the wealthiest precious metal strikes in the history of the American West, and by the end of his life was one of the wealthiest men in the United States. Gregory Crouch tells Mackay’s fascinating story in The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Riches in the American West (Scribner, 2018). Crouch’s book is about more than Mackay’s rags to riches tale, however. The Bonanza King is also a portrait of Virginia City, Nevada, as it grew from dusty mining camp to mountain boomtown before falling again into relative obscurity. Mackay and Virginia City together encapsulate how the mineral economy of the Great Basin could create and destroy seemingly on a whim, and The Bonanza King is a rollicking retelling of how the man and the place were inseparably linked during the heady days of th

Firesign Theatre co-founder Phil Proctor shares stories from his life and career in his new memoir, Where’s My Fortune Cookie? (Blurb, 2017) co-written with Brad Shreiber. In Where’s My Fortune Cookie? Proctor shares the history of his work with Firesign Theatre and other comedy recordings in addition to his work on stage, film, and television. The book contains over 120 photographs documenting Phil’s life and career. Proctor’s early life as well as his 65-year career is documented in his new memoir that is told through stories of his professional and personal adventures. Proctor documents his experiences and at time psychic connections throughout his extraordinary life. In this podcast, Proctor describes the Firesign Theatre, a comedy group that created counter-culture comedy and records starting in the 1960s. Through this work, the group worked alongside other psychedelic new age artists and activists to make a cultural difference. Firesign Theatre was responsible for reshaping comedy and culture and Phil

Although commonly regarded as one of the three or four greatest Presidents and certainly the greatest of the 20th century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt has not had as much attention devoted to his life, as many of the Presidents who came after him.  That egregious oversight, has now been remedy by virtue of premier historian, and past winner of the Bancroft award Robert Dallek’s new study, titled Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life (Viking, 2017). Dallek’s book takes us from Roosevelt’s sheltered and upper-class upbringing to his career as a precocious politician, navy administrator and Vice-Presidential candidate.  Dallek in extremely readable prose shows how the snobbish and sometimes facile Roosevelt was changed for the better by his struggle with polio at the age of 39.  With his being on the shelf politically speaking during most of the 1920’s, Dallek recounts how Roosevelt climbed from the Governorship of New York to being elected President of a Depression-haunted America in 1932. With the New Deal, Da

Most studies of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander III focus on the military aspects of his life and reign. Yet Alexander’s campaigns would not have been possible had it not been for the enormous plunder his armies seized in their conquests. In The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man’s Wealth Shaped the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), Frank L. Holt sifts through the ancient sources to provide new insights into an understudied aspect of Alexander’s empire. Though he subsequently downplayed its holdings, Alexander inherited a substantial treasury when he took the throne in 336 BCE. This he used to win the vast wealth possessed by the Persian monarchy, making himself the richest person in the world in the process. Alexander employed his wealth in numerous ways to solidify his rule, yet as Holt demonstrates at various points even he was forced to borrow money in order to cover the expenses of his ongoing campaigns, which he did by turning to the similarly-enriched soldiers accompanying him. Learn

Harold Washington’s election as mayor of Chicago in 1983 sent a shockwave through the politics of America’s third largest city, one that reverberated for decades afterward. Yet as Roger Biles describes in his book Mayor Harold Washington: Champion of Race and Reform in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Washington’s promise as mayor was in many respects unfulfilled. The son of parents who moved to the city during the Great Migration of the early 20th century, Washington was involved in politics from an early age. Though a member of the powerful party organization led by Richard J. Daley, Washington demonstrated an independent streak during his time in the Illinois state legislature. After an initial attempt to succeed Daley fizzled in 1977, Washington won the office six years later thanks to a remarkable coalition of interests and an unprecedented voter mobilization of the African American populace. As mayor Washington quickly found many of his efforts to implement a progressive agenda thwarted by

Despite having been Foreign Secretary, Secretary of State for War, Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India, Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne is one of the least well known political figures of the 1st rank in late 19th-century / early 20th-century British politics. The great-grandson of Talleyrand and according to Lord Vansittart, the Foreign Secretary with the best command of French of any in his personal experience, Lord Lansdowne has not had a biography devoted to him since the official one by Lord Newton almost ninety-years ago. To rectify this horrible oversight, Lansdowne’s direct descendent, Simon, Lord Kerry, has written a brilliant life of his famous ancestor–Lansdowne: The Last Great Whig (Unicorn Publishing Group, 2018). Covering the entirety of Lansdowne political life, Simon Kerry brings out the inner Lord Lansdowne, which was not readily seen by his contemporaries. The Lansdowne who almost single-handled engineered the revolution in British foreign po

There are few living American classical composers for whom an academic biography has been published, but Libby Larsen deserves this type of study. At the opening of her book, Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Denise Von Glahn describes her subject’s life as a “polyphony”—made up of multiple strands of music, career, and family. In order to make sense of Larsen’s long and accomplished career (and her hundreds of pieces of music), Von Glahn divides the biography into a close examination of the factors that most influenced Larsen’s life and music: family, religion, nature, the academy, gender, technology, and her collaborations. In each chapter, Von Glahn weaves a consideration of Larsen’s life with analyses of some of her major compositions. Larsen grew up and still lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has always considered herself something of an outsider in the world of classical music. She does not live in New York City (the epicenter of American classical music);